+Inevitability

The work ahead is assembling itself from darker material than I would have chosen, though choice seems beside the point. Something has entered my waters as of late. Safety and awareness, concepts I once trusted, now feel compromised by patterns of love and loss I cannot escape.

So I cast out anyway.

Lines dragged across open and unfamiliar seas. The first to bite are always the wanderers of the shallows, small and careless things. But they are never alone. The deeper hunters follow them in, patient and starving. Soon the water is alive with it, survival feeding on survival, every mouth opening for something softer than itself.

The lines grow heavy in my hands.

Each pull draws me farther from shore, toward water too deep to stand in, too dark to see through. I cannot swim well enough for what waits there, and still the lines hold. Still, I keep casting.

Though I could never predict what is coming, it still feels patently scripted. I set out believing I was pursuing one thing, sometimes even congratulating myself on a higher-minded theme, only for the personal to invade. Inevitably I find myself back where I always end up: working on myself through all of it.

I have held onto my work for years, keeping it close. One by one, the pieces begin to speak from the experience of exposure, emerging with messages I did not yet understand when I made them. The work is finished, yet its meaning arrives later, sometimes years later, when it finally reveals itself to me. How can a message be so deeply embedded and still elude the one with the hands and materials that brought it into being? My mind does not always match my making. That delay leaves space for life to intervene, for experience to shape what the work was trying to say all along, long after whatever vision I thought I had has fallen away.

I wonder now what a “higher-minded” theme even means, when everything is so personal. I pull myself into the deep, surrendering to whatever unknown language waits to speak. My curiosity plagues me, the bastard child of appetite, and it will not let me cut the line.